Despite a crash, Indian railways have an impressive safety record
It was around 7 pm on June 2nd when a train traveling from Kolkata in West Bengal to Chennai, 1,700km down India’s east coast, smashed at full speed into a parked freight train in the state of Odisha 250km south of Kolkata. The passenger train’s coaches were derailed and collided with the rear coaches of another train traveling in the opposite direction.
The trains were carrying some 2,000 people, many of them migrants from West Bengal seeking work in the richer south. By the time officials declared rescue operations over two days later, 275 were known to have been killed and more than 1,100 injured; three more have since succumbed to their injuries.
Rail travel is not especially dangerous in India, where some 20m people take a train every day. Of the roughly 25,000 who died in train-related accidents every year before the pandemic (a number that had changed little in a decade), most were run over or fell out of trains. A tiny minority died in derailments or collisions. The number of serious accidents is declining. By contrast, some 300,000 people die in road accidents in India every year, reckons the World Health Organisation.
Imagine that you normally take the train. One day, you see that your usual train take got derailed off the tracks! Would you be more inclined to take other modes of transport?
According to the Psychology studies presented in Thinking, Fast, and Slow, most people would choose other modes of transport. Yet in reality, the crash was just one event and does not affect the overall probability of a train crash. According to the data, you would be far more likely to die from driving a car to work than from taking the train.
The human tendency to overestimate the probability of an event based on how recently we’ve been exposed to it is known as availability bias. The more we’re exposed to an event (on the news for example), the easier we remember it. And the easier we can remember it, the higher we estimate the probability of it occurring. What ends up happening is that we overestimate the probability of unlikely events occurring, leading us to miscalculate important decisions.
Availability bias is most prominent when we are exposed to unlikely yet scary events. We think about the scary events more because they stick in our heads; we just can’t stop thinking about them! Here are a few more examples of common availability bias.
Similar to the train crash, there are other freak accident events that pop up on the news from time to time and end up making people overly scared.
Everything from plane crashes, dog attacks, and getting shot by someone on the street. These are all incredibly rare events, but because it gets shown on the news we tend to be hyper-aware of them.
An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action.
On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news.
The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Rationalists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.”
